The New York Stories of Edith Wharton

by Edith Wharton

  VI

  He sat in his library, waiting. Waiting for what? Life was over for him now that she was dead. Until after the funeral a sort of factitious excitement had kept him on his feet. Now there was nothing left but to go over and over those last days. Every detail of them stood out before him in unbearable relief; and one of the most salient had been the unexpected appearance in the sick room of Dorrance’s former doctor—the very doctor who, with the cancer specialist, had signed the diagnosis of Dorrance’s case. Dorrance, since that day, had naturally never consulted him professionally; and it chanced that they had never met. But Eleanor’s physician, summoned at the moment of her last heart attack, without even stopping to notify Dorrance, had called in his colleague. The latter had a high standing as a consultant (the idea made Dorrance smile); and besides, what did it matter? By that time they all knew—nurses, doctors, and most of all Dorrance himself—that nothing was possible but to ease the pangs of Eleanor’s last hours. And Dorrance had met his former doctor without resentment; hardly even with surprise.

  But the doctor had not forgotten that he and his former patient had been old friends; and the day after the funeral, late in the evening, had thought it proper to ring the widower’s doorbell and present his condolences. Dorrance, at his entrance, looked up in surprise, at first resenting the intrusion, then secretly relieved at the momentary release from the fiery wheel of his own thoughts. “The man is a fool—but perhaps,” Dorrance reflected, “he’ll give me something that will make me sleep....”

  The two men sat down, and the doctor began to talk gently of Eleanor. He had known her for many years, though not professionally. He spoke of her goodness, her charity, the many instances he had come across among his poor patients of her discreet and untiring ministrations. Dorrance, who had dreaded hearing her spoken of, and by this man above all others, found himself listening with a curious avidity to these reminiscences. He needed no one to tell him of Eleanor’s kindness, her devotion—yet at the moment such praise was sweet to him. And he took up the theme; but not without a secret stir of vindictiveness, a vague desire to make the doctor suffer for the results of his now-distant blunder. “She always gave too much of herself—that was the trouble. No one knows that better than I do. She was never really the same after those months of incessant anxiety about me that you doctors made her undergo.” He had not intended to say anything of the sort; but as he spoke the resentment he had thought extinct was fanned into flame by his words. He had forgiven the two doctors for himself, but he suddenly found he could not forgive them for Eleanor, and he had an angry wish to let them know it. “That diagnosis of yours nearly killed her, though it didn’t kill me,” he concluded sardonically.

  The doctor had followed this outburst with a look of visible perplexity. In the crowded life of a fashionable physician, what room was there to remember a mistaken diagnosis? The sight of his forgetfulness made Dorrance continue with rising irritation: shock of it did kill her—I see that now.”

  “Diagnosis—what diagnosis?” echoed the doctor blankly.

  “I see you don’t remember,” said Dorrance.

  “Well, no; I don’t, for the moment.”

  “I’ll remind you, then. When you came to see me with that cancer specialist four or five years ago, one of you dropped your diagnosis by mistake in going out....”

  “Oh, that?” The doctor’s face lit up with sudden recollection. “Of course! The diagnosis of the other poor fellow we’d been to see before coming to you. I remember it all now. Your wife—Mrs. Welwood then, wasn’t she?—brought the paper back to me a few hours laterI’d even missed it. I think she said you’d picked it up after we left, and thought it was meant for you.” The doctor gave an easy retrospective laugh. “Luckily I was able to reassure her at once.” He leaned back comfortably in his armchair and shifted his voice to the pitch of condolence. “A beautiful life, your wife’s was. I only wish it had been in our power to prolong it. But these cases of heart failure...you must tell yourself that at least you had a few happy years; and so many of us haven’t even that.” The doctor stood up and held out his hand.

  “Wait a moment, please,” Dorrance said hurriedly. “There’s something I want to ask you.” His brain was whirling so that he could not remember what he had started to say. “I can’t sleep....” he began.

  “Yes?” said the doctor, assuming a professional look, but with a furtive glance at his wrist watch.

  Dorrance’s throat felt dry and his head empty. He struggled with the difficulty of ordering his thoughts, and fitting rational words to them.

  “Yes—but no matter about my sleeping. What I meant was: do I understand you to say that the diagnosis you dropped in leaving was not intended for me?”

  The doctor stared. “Good Lord, no—of course it wasn’t. You never had a symptom. Didn’t we both tell you so at the time?”

  “Yes,” Dorrance slowly acquiesced.

  “Well, if you didn’t believe us, your scare was a short one, anyhow,” the doctor continued with a mild jocularity; and he put his hand out again.

  “Oh, wait,” Dorrance repeated. “What I really wanted to ask was what day you said my wife returned the diagnosis to you? But I suppose you don’t remember.”

  The doctor reflected. “Yes, I do; it all comes back to me now. It was the very same day. We called on you in the morning, didn’t we?”

  “Yes; at nine o’clock,” said Dorrance, the dryness returning to his throat.

  “Well, Mrs. Welwood brought the diagnosis back to me directly afterward.”

  “You think it was the very same day?” (Dorrance wondered to himself why he continued to insist on this particular point.)

  The doctor took another stolen glance at his watch. “I’m sure it was. I remember now that it was my consultation day, and that she caught me at two o’clock, before I saw my first patient. We had a good laugh over the scare you’d had.”

  “I see,” said Dorrance.

  “Your wife had one of the sweetest laughs I ever heard,” continued the doctor, with an expression of melancholy reminiscence.

  There was a silence, and Dorrance was conscious that his vistor was looking at him with growing perplexity. He too gave a slight laugh. “I thought perhaps it was the day after,” he mumbled vaguely. “Anyhow, you did give me a good scare.”

  “Yes,” said the doctor. “But it didn’t last long, did it? I asked your wife to make my peace with you. You know such things will happen to hurried doctors. I hope she persuaded you to forgive me?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Dorrance, as he followed the doctor to the door to let him out.

  “Well, now about that sleeping—” the doctor checked himself on the threshold to ask.

  “Sleeping?” Dorrance stared. “Oh, I shall sleep all right tonight,” he said with sudden decision, as he closed the door on his visitor.

  POMEGRANATE SEED

  CHARLOTTE Ashby paused on her door-step. Dark had descended on the brilliancy of the March afternoon, and the grinding rasping street life of the city was at its highest. She turned her back on it, standing for a moment in the old-fashioned, marble-flagged vestibule before she inserted her key in the lock. The sash curtains drawn across the panes of the inner door softened the light within to a warm blur through which no details showed. It was the hour when, in the first months of her marriage to Kenneth Ashby, she had most liked to return to that quiet house in a street long since deserted by business and fashion. The contrast between the soulless roar of New York, its devouring blaze of lights, the oppression of its congested traffic, congested houses, lives, minds and this veiled sanctuary she called home, always stirred her profoundly. In the very heart of the hurricane she had found her tiny islet—or thought she had. And now, in the last months, everything was changed, and she always wavered on the door-step and had to force herself to enter.

  While she stood there she called up the scene within: the hall hung with old prints, the ladderlike stairs, and on the left her husban
d’s long shabby library, full of books and pipes and worn armchairs inviting to meditation. How she had loved that room! Then, up stairs, her own drawing-room, in which, since the death of Kenneth’s first wife, neither furniture nor hangings had been changed, because there had never been money enough, but which Charlotte had made her own by moving furniture about and adding more books, another lamp, a table for the new reviews. Even on the occasion of her only visit to the first Mrs. Ashby—a distant, self-centered woman, whom she had known very slightly—she had looked about her with an innocent envy, feeling it to be exactly the drawing-room she would have liked for herself; and now for more than a year it had been hers to deal with as she chose—the room to which she hastened back at dusk on winter days, where she sat reading by the fire, or answering notes at the pleasant roomy desk, or going over her stepchildren’s copy-books, till she heard her husband’s step.

  Sometimes friends dropped in; sometimes—oftener—she was alone; and she liked that best, since it was another way of being with Kenneth, thinking over what he had said when they parted in the morning, imagining what he would say when he sprang up the stairs, found her by herself and caught her to him.

  Now, instead of this, she thought of one thing only—the letter she might or might not find on the hall table. Until she had made sure whether or not it was there, her mind had no room for anything else. The letter was always the same—a square grayish envelope with “Kenneth Ashby, Esquire,” written on it in bold but faint characters. From the first it had struck Charlotte as peculiar that anyone who wrote such a firm hand should trace the letters so lightly; the address was always written as though there were not enough ink in the pen, or the writer’s wrist were too weak to bear upon it. Another curious thing was that, in spite of its masculine curves, the writing was so visibly feminine. Some hands are sexless, some masculine, at first glance; the writing on the gray envelope, for all its strength and assurance, was without doubt a woman’s. The envelope never bore anything but the recipient’s name; no stamp, no address. The letter was presumably delivered by hand—but by whose? No doubt it was slipped into the letter-box, whence the parlor-maid, when she closed the shutters and lit the lights, probably extracted it. At any rate, it was always in the evening, after dark, that Charlotte saw it lying there. She thought of the letter in the singular, as ,” because, though there had been several since her marriage—seven, to be exact—they were so alike in appearance that they had become merged in one another in her mind, become one letter, become “it.”

  The first had come the day after their return from their honeymoon—a journey prolonged to the West Indies, from which they had returned to New York after an absence of more than two months. Re-entering the house with her husband, late on that first evening—they had dined at his mother’s—she had seen, alone on the hall table, the gray envelope. Her eye fell on it before Kenneth’s, and her first thought was: “Why, I’ve seen that writing before”; but where she could not recall. The memory was just definite enough for her to identify the script whenever it looked up at her faintly from the same pale envelope; but on that first day she would have thought no more of the letter if, when her husband’s glance lit on it, she had not chanced to be looking at him. It all happened in a flash—his seeing the letter, putting out his hand for it, raising it to his short-sighted eyes to decipher the faint writing, and then abruptly withdrawing the arm he had slipped through Charlotte’s, and moving away to the hanging light, his back turned to her. She had waited—waited for a sound, an exclamation; waited for him to open the letter; but he had slipped it into his pocket without a word and followed her into the library. And there they had sat down by the fire and lit their cigarettes, and he had remained silent, his head thrown back broodingly against the armchair, his eyes fixed on the hearth, and presently had passed his hand over his forehead and said: “Wasn’t it unusually hot at my mother’s tonight? I’ve got a splitting head. Mind if I take myself off to bed?”

  That was the first time. Since then Charlotte had never been present when he had received the letter. It usually came before he got home from his office, and she had to go up stairs and leave it lying there. But even if she had not seen it, she would have known it had come by the change in his face when he joined her—which, on those evenings, he seldom did before they met for dinner. Evidently, whatever the letter contained, he wanted to be by himself to deal with it; and when he reappeared he looked years older, looked emptied of life and courage, and hardly conscious of her presence. Sometimes he was silent for the rest of the evening; and if he spoke, it was usually to hint some criticism of her household arrangements, suggest some change in the domestic administration, to ask, a little nervously, if she didn’t think Joyce’s nursery governess was rather young and flighty, or if she herself always saw to it that Peter—whose throat was delicate—was properly wrapped up when he went to school. At such times Charlotte would remember the friendly warnings she had received when she became engaged to Kenneth Ashby: “Marrying a heartbroken widower! Isn’t that rather risky? You know Elsie Ashby absolutely dominated him”; and how she had jokingly replied: “He may be glad of a little liberty for a change.” And in this respect she had been right. She had needed no one to tell her, during the first months, that her husband was perfectly happy with her. When they came back from their protracted honeymoon the same friends said: “What have you done to Kenneth? He looks twenty years younger”; and this time she answered with careless joy: “I suppose I’ve got him out of his groove.”

  But what she noticed after the gray letters began to come was not so much his nervous tentative faultfinding—which always seemed to be uttered against his will—as the look in his eyes when he joined her after receiving one of the letters. The look was not unloving, not even indifferent; it was the look of a man who had been so far away from ordinary events that when he returns to familiar things they seem strange. She minded that more than the faultfinding.

  Though she had been sure from the first that the handwriting on the gray envelope was a woman’s, it was long before she associated the mysterious letters with any sentimental secret. She was too sure of her husband’s love, too confident of filling his life, for such an idea to occur to her. It seemed far more likely that the letters—which certainly did not appear to cause him any sentimental pleasure—were addressed to the busy lawyer than to the private person. Probably they were from some tiresome client—women, he had often told her, were nearly always tiresome as clients—who did not want her letters opened by his secretary and therefore had them carried to his house. Yes; but in that case the unknown female must be unusually troublesome, judging from the effect her letters produced. Then again, though his professional discretion was exemplary, it was odd that he had never uttered an impatient comment, never remarked to Charlotte, in a moment of expansion, that there was a nuisance of a woman who kept badgering him about a case that had gone against her. He had made more than one semi-confidence of the kind—of course without giving names or details; but concerning this mysterious correspondent his lips were sealed.

  There was another possibility: what is euphemistically called an “old entanglement.” Charlotte Ashby was a sophisticated woman. She had few illusions about the intricacies of the human heart; she knew that there were often old entanglements. But when she had married Kenneth Ashby, her friends, instead of hinting at such a possibility, had said: “You’ve got your work cut out for you. Marrying a Don Juan is a sinecure to it. Kenneth’s never looked at another woman since he first saw Elsie Corder. During all the years of their marriage he was more like an unhappy lover than a comfortably contented husband. He’ll never let you move an armchair or change the place of a lamp; and whatever you venture to do, he’ll mentally compare with what Elsie would have done in your place.”

  Except for an occasional nervous mistrust as to her ability to manage the children—a mistrust gradually dispelled by her good humor and the children’s obvious fondness for her—none of these forebodings ha
d come true. The desolate widower, of whom his nearest friends said that only his absorbing professional interests had kept him from suicide after his first wife’s death, had fallen in love, two years later, with Charlotte Gorse, and after an impetuous wooing had married her and carried her off on a tropical honeymoon. And ever since he had been as tender and loverlike as during those first radiant weeks. Before asking her to marry him he had spoken to her frankly of his great love for his first wife and his despair after her sudden death; but even then he had assumed no stricken attitude, or implied that life offered no possibility of renewal. He had been perfectly simple and natural, and had confessed to Charlotte that from the beginning he had hoped the future held new gifts for him. And when, after their marriage, they returned to the house where his twelve years with his first wife had been spent, he had told Charlotte at once that he was sorry he couldn’t afford to do the place over for her, but that he knew every woman had her own views about furniture and all sorts of household arrangements a man would never notice, and had begged her to make any changes she saw fit without bothering to consult him. As a result, she made as few as possible; but his way of beginning their new life in the old setting was so frank and unembarrassed that it put her immediately at her ease, and she was almost sorry to find that the portrait of Elsie Ashby, which used to hang over the desk in his library, had been transferred in their absence to the children’s nursery. Knowing herself to be the indirect cause of this banishment, she spoke of it to her husband; but he answered: “Oh, I thought they ought to grow up with her looking down on them.” The answer moved Charlotte, and satisfied her; and as time went by she had to confess that she felt more at home in her house, more at ease and in confidence with her husband, since that long coldly beautiful face on the library wall no longer followed her with guarded eyes. It was as if Kenneth’s love had penetrated to the secret she hardly acknowledged to her own heart—her passionate need to feel herself the sovereign even of his past.